"Mr. L."s proficiency in Romany," said Mr. Roebuck, "is well known to me.
I have heard him spoken of as the successor to George Borrow."
"That," I replied, "I do not deserve. There are other gentlemen in England who are by far my superiors in knowledge of the people."
And I spoke very sincerely. Apropos of Mr. George Borrow, I knew him, and a grand old fellow he was,--a fresh and hearty giant, holding his six feet two or three inches as uprightly at eighty as he ever had at eighteen. I believe that was his age, but may be wrong. Borrow was like one of the old Norse heroes, whom he so much admired, or an old-fashioned gypsy bruiser, full of craft and merry tricks. One of these he played on me, and I bear him no malice for it. The manner of the joke was this: I had written a book on the English gypsies and their language; but before I announced it, I wrote a letter to Father George, telling him that I proposed to print it, and asking his permission to dedicate it to him.
He did not answer the letter, but "worked the tip" promptly enough, for he immediately announced in the newspapers on the following Monday his "Word-Book of the Romany Language," "with many pieces in gypsy, ill.u.s.trative of the way of speaking and thinking of the English gypsies, with specimens of their poetry, and an account of various things relating to gypsy life in England." This was exactly what I had told him that my book would contain; for I intended originally to publish a vocabulary.
Father George covered the track by not answering my letter; but I subsequently ascertained that it had been faithfully delivered to him by a gentleman from whom I obtained the information.
It was like the contest between Hildebrand the elder and his son:--
"A ready trick tried Hildebrand, That old, gray-bearded man; For when the younger raised to strike, Beneath his sword he ran."
And, like the son, I had no ill feeling about it. My obligations to him for "Lavengro" and the "Romany Rye" and his other works are such as I owe to few men. I have enjoyed gypsying more than any sport in the world, and I owe my love of it all to George Borrow. I have since heard that a part of Mr. Borrow"s "Romano Lavo-Lil" had been in ma.n.u.script for thirty years, and that it might never have been published but for my own work.
I hope that this is true; for I am sincerely proud to think that I may have been in any way, directly or indirectly, the cause of his giving it to the world. I would gladly enough have burnt my own book, as I said, with a hearty laugh, when I saw the announcement of the "Lavo-Lil," if it would have pleased the old Romany rye, and I never spoke a truer word.
He would not have believed it; but it would have been true, all the same.
I well remember the first time I met George Borrow. It was in the British Museum, and I was introduced to him by Mrs. Estelle Lewis,--now dead,--the well known-friend of Edgar A. Poe. He was seated at a table, and had a large old German folio open before him. We talked about gypsies, and I told him that I had unquestionably found the word for "green," _shelno_, in use among the English Romany. He a.s.sented, and said that he knew it. I mention this as a proof of the manner in which the "Romano Lavo-Lil" must have been hurried, because he declares in it that there is no English gypsy word for "green." In this work he a.s.serts that the English gypsy speech does not probably amount to fourteen hundred words. It is a weakness with the Romany rye fraternity to believe that there are no words in gypsy which they to not know. I am sure that my own collection contains nearly four thousand Anglo-Romany terms, many of which I feared were doubtful, but which I am constantly verifying. America is a far better place in which to study the language than England. As an old Scotch gypsy said to me lately, the deepest and cleverest old gypsies all come over here to America, where they have grown rich, and built the old language up again.
I knew a gentleman in London who was a man of extraordinary energy.
Having been utterly ruined, at seventy years of age, by a relative, he left England, was absent two or three years in a foreign country, during which time he made in business some fifty thousand pounds, and, returning, settled down in England. He had been in youth for a long time the most intimate friend of George Borrow, who was, he said, a very wild and eccentric youth. One night, when skylarking about London, Borrow was pursued by the police, as he wished to be, even as Panurge so planned as to be chased by the night-watch. He was very tall and strong in those days, a trained shoulder-hitter, and could run like a deer. He was hunted to the Thames, "and there they thought they had him." But the Romany rye made for the edge, and, leaping into the wan water, like the Squyre in the old ballad, swam to the other side, and escaped.
I have conversed with Mr. Borrow on many subjects,--horses, gypsies, and Old Irish. Anent which latter subject I have heard him declare that he doubted whether there was any man living who could really read an old Irish ma.n.u.script. I have seen the same statement made by another writer.
My personal impressions of Mr. Borrow were very agreeable, and I was pleased to learn afterwards from Mrs. Lewis that he had expressed himself warmly as regarded myself. As he was not invariably disposed to like those whom be met, it is a source of great pleasure to me to reflect that I have nothing but pleasant memories of the good old Romany rye, the Nestor of gypsy gentlemen. It is commonly reported among gypsies that Mr. Borrow was one by blood, and that his real name was Boro, or great.
This is not true. He was of pure English extraction.
When I first met "George Eliot" and G. H. Lewes, at their house in North Bank, the lady turned the conversation almost at once to gypsies. They spoke of having visited the Zincali in Spain, and of several very curious meetings with the _Chabos_. Mr. Lewes, in fact, seldom met me--and we met very often about town, and at many places, especially at the Trubners"--without conversing on the Romanys. The subject evidently had for him a special fascination. I believe that I have elsewhere mentioned that after I returned from Russia, and had given him, by particular request, an account of my visits to the gypsies of St. Petersburg and Moscow, he was much struck by the fact that I had chiromanced to the Romany clan of the latter city. To tell the fortunes of gypsy girls was, he thought, the refinement of presumption. "There was in this world nothing so impudent as a gypsy when determined to tell a fortune; and the idea of not one, but many gypsy girls believing earnestly in my palmistry was like a righteous retribution."
The late Tom Taylor had, while a student at Cambridge, been _aficionado_, or smitten, with gypsies, and made a ma.n.u.script vocabulary of Romany words, which he allowed me to use, and from which I obtained several which were new to me. This fact should make all smart gypsy scholars "take tent" and heed as to believing that they know everything. I have many Anglo-Romany words--purely Hindi as to origin--which I have verified again and again, yet which have never appeared in print. Thus far the Romany vocabulary field has been merely scratched over.
Who that knows London knoweth not Sir Patrick Colquhoun? I made his acquaintance in 1848, when, coming over from student-life in Paris and the Revolution, I was most kindly treated by his family. A glorious, tough, widely experienced man he was even in early youth. For then he already bore the enviable reputation of being the first amateur sculler on the Thames, the first gentleman light-weight boxer in England, a graduate with honors of Cambridge, a Doctor Ph. of Heidelberg, a diplomat, and a linguist who knew Arabic, Persian, and Gaelic, Modern Greek and the Omnium Botherum tongues. They don"t make such men nowadays, or, if they do, they leave out the genial element.
Years had pa.s.sed, and I had returned to London in 1870, and found Sir Patrick living, as of yore, in the Temple, where I once and yet again and again dined with him. It was in the early days of this new spring of English life that we found ourselves by chance at a boat-race on the Thames. It was on the Thames, by his invitation, that I had twenty years before first seen an English regatta, and had a place in the gayly decked, superbly luncheoned barge of his club. It is a curious point in English character that the cleverest people do not realize or understand how festive and genial they really are, or how gayly and picturesquely they conduct their sports. It is a generally accepted doctrine with them that they do this kind of thing better in France; they believe sincerely that they take their own amus.e.m.e.nts sadly; it is the tone, the style, with the wearily-witty, dreary clowns of the weekly press, in their watery imitations of Thackeray"s worst, to ridicule all English festivity and merry-making, as though sunshine had faded out of life, and G.o.d and Nature were dead, and in their place a great wind-bag Jesuit-Mallock were crying, in tones tainted with sulphuretted hydrogen, "_Ah bah_!" Reader mine, I have seen many a fete in my time, all the way from illuminations of Paris to the Khedive"s fifteen-million-dollar spree in 1873 and the last grand flash of the Roman-candle carnival of 1846, but for true, hearty enjoyment and quiet beauty give me a merry party on the Thames.
Give me, I say, its sparkling waters, its green banks, the joyous, beautiful girls, the hearty, handsome men. Give me the boats, darting like fishes, the gay cries. And oh--oh!--give me the Alsopp"s ale in a quart mug, and not a remark save of approbation when I empty it.
I had met Sir Patrick in the crowd, and our conversation turned on gypsies. When living before-time in Roumania, he had Romany servants, and learned a little of their language. Yes, he was inclined to be "affected" into the race, and thereupon we went gypsying. Truly, we had not far to seek, for just outside the crowd a large and flourishing community of the black-blood had set itself up in the _pivlioi_ (cocoa-nut) or _kashta_ (stick) business, and as it was late in the afternoon, and the entire business-world was about as drunk as mere beer could make it, the scene was not unlively. At that time I was new to England, and unknown to every gypsy on the ground. In after-days I learned to know them well, very well, for they were chiefly Coopers and their congeners, who came to speak of me as _their_ rye and own special property or proprietor,--an allegiance which involved on one side an amount of shillings and beer which concentrated might have set up a charity, but which was duly reciprocated on the other by jocular tenures of cocoa-nuts, baskets, and choice and deep words in the language of Egypt.
As we approached the c.o.c.k-shy, where sticks were cast at cocoa-nuts, a young gypsy _chai_, whom I learned to know in after-days as Athalia Cooper, asked me to buy some sticks. A penny a throw, all the cocoa-nuts I could hit to be my own. I declined; she became urgent, jolly, riotous, insistive. I endured it well, for I held the winning cards. _Qui minus propere_, _minus prospere_. And then, as her voice rose _crescendo_ into a bawl, so that all the Romanys around laughed aloud to see the green Gorgio so chaffed and bothered, I bent me low, and whispered softly in her ear a single monosyllable.
Why are all those sticks dropped so suddenly? Why does Athalia in a second become sober, and stand up staring at me, all her chaff and urgency forgotten. Quite polite and earnest now. But there is joy behind in her heart. This _is_ a game, a jolly game, and no mistake.
And uplifting her voice again, as the voice of one who findeth an exceeding great treasure even in the wilderness, she cried aloud,--"_It"s a Romany rye_!"
The spiciest and saltest and rosiest of Sir Patrick"s own stories, told after dinner over his own old port to a special conventicle of clergymen about town, was never received with such a roar of delight as that cry of Athalia"s was by the Romany clan. Up went three sheers at the find; further afield went the shout proclaiming the discovery of an aristocratic stranger of their race, a _rye_, who was to them as wheat,--a gypsy gentleman. Neglecting business, they threw down their sticks, and left their cocoanuts to grin in solitude; the _dyes_ turned aside from fortune-telling to see what strange fortune had sent such a visitor. In ten minutes Sir Patrick and I were surrounded by such a circle of sudden admirers and vehement applauders, as it seldom happens to any mortal to acquire--out of Ireland--at such exceedingly short notice and on such easy terms.
They were not particular as to what sort of a gypsy I was, or where I came from, or any nonsense of that sort, you know. It was about _cerevisia vincit omnia_, or the beery time of day with them, and they cared not for anything. I was extremely welcome; in short, there was poetry in me. I had come down on them by a way that was dark and a trick that was vain, in the path of mystery, and dropped on Athalia and picked her up. It was gypsily done and very creditable to me, and even Sir Patrick was regarded as one to be honored as an accomplice. It is a charming novelty in every life to have the better cla.s.s of one"s own kind come into it, and n.o.body feels so keenly as a jolly Romany that _jucundum nihil est nisi quod ref icit varietas_--naught pleases us without variety.
Then and there I drew to me the first threads of what became in after-days a strange and varied skein of humanity. There was the Thames upon a holiday. Now I look back to it, I ask, _Ubi sunt_? (Where are they all?) Joshua Cooper, as good and earnest a Rom as ever lived, in his grave, with more than one of those who made my acquaintance by hurrahing for me. Some in America, some wandering wide. Yet there by Weybridge still the Thames runs on.
By that sweet river I made many a song. One of these, to the tune of "Waves in Sunlight Dancing," rises and falls in memory like a fitful fairy coming and going in green shadows, and that it may not perish utterly I here give it a place:--
AVELLA PARL O PANI.
Av" kushto parl o pani, Av" kushto mir" akai!
Mi kameli chovihani, Avel ke tiro rye!
Shan raklia rinkenidiri, Mukkellan rinkeni se; Kek rakli "dre i temia Se rinkenidiri mi.
Shan dudnidiri yakka, Mukkelan dudeni; Kek yakk peshel" sa kushti Pa miro kameli zi.
Shan balia longi diri, Mukk "lende bori "pre, Kek waveri raklia balia, Te lian man opre.
Yoi lela angustrini, I miri tacheni, Kek wavei mush jinella, Sa dovo covva se.
Adre, adre o doeyav Patrinia pellelan, Kenna yek chumer kerdo O wavero well" an.
Te wenna butidiri, Ke jana sig akoi Sa sig sa yeck si gillo Shan waveri adoi.
Avella parl o pani, Avella sig akai!
Mi kamli tani-rani Avell" ke tiro rye!
COME OVER THE RIVER
O love, come o"er the water, O love, where"er you be!
My own sweetheart, my darling, Come over the river to me!
If any girls are fairer, Then fairer let them be; No maid in all the country Is half so fair to me.
If other eyes are brighter, Then brighter let them shine; I know that none are lighter Upon this heart of mine.
If other"s locks are longer, Then longer let them grow; Hers are the only fish-lines Which ever caught me so.
She wears upon her finger A ring we know so well, And we and that ring only Know what the ring can tell.
From trees into the water Leaves fall and float away, So kisses come and leave us, A thousand in a day.
Yet though they come by thousands, Yet still they show their face; As soon as one has left us Another fills its place.
O love, come o"er the water, O lore, where"er you be!
My own sweetheart, my darling, Come over the river to me!
WELSH GYPSIES.
I. MAT WOODS THE FIDDLER.